The kind of dairy restaurant that I was acquainted with, growing up in New York City, and from the 50s until the 80s, they seemed to be an eternal institution. They were there before I was born.

But in researching this subject, I discovered that there were just a blip in a much larger world wide history of dairy-eating in public. Throughout northern Europe they developed a whole culture around milk eating, milk drinking. There were milk pavilions in Germany. There were places called dairies that were modeled after dairy farms, and were a sort of cafe restaurants. In Warsaw the 1929 business directory of Warsaw lists hundreds of these institutions called Mleczarnie, which were modeled after these dairy-eating places and about,

I think, twenty nine or so were owned and run by Jews. This culture, you know, with European immigration, moved to America. The Jewish innovation was to say, we will serve a kind of pan-Eastern European dairy cuisine … we won't serve meat. By the time I came into the world these dairy restaurants, these specifically Jewish

dairy restaurants, were catering to people who wanted to eat dishes that they either couldn't prepare at home or didn't know how to prepare. I mean, gefilte fish, even blintzes. And people would gravitate to these places for the cuisine.

Some of the kind of core dishes are the things I would like; would be a gefilte fish. I'd have a side of kasha varnishkes, which is kasha with this kind of bow-tie noodles … borscht - any kind of vegetarian borscht. One of my favourite dairy dishes is farmer's cheese and noodles with sauteed onions. And when I mention that it’s an interesting thing to eat, people roll their eyes, but it was kind of a real staple. The menu sort of slowly adopted the whole American quick lunch menu, tuna sandwiches, all kinds of salads, omelets, everything you could get in any Greek coffee shop in New York, that was all adopted by the dairy restaurant pretty early on.

Somebody could go there and never eat an Eastern European dish. I mean, that was very likely.Between 1900 and 1980 I counted about two hundred different dairy restaurants operating in the New York area and other large Jewish cities. If you look at the Brooklyn classified directory from 1939, there are two thousand nine hundred and one restaurants listed. And just from the names, it seems only about 13 of them were dairies in Manhattan. They were not the majority of restaurants. And one of the reasons there’s not a lot of documentation or artifacts - these were not kind of destination restaurants, in the early days.

You see many more postcards from meat-based restaurants, Jewish meat-based restaurants. One of the reasons some disappeared was that the cost of certified Jewish food caused the prices to rise. And so if you wanted a salad, you'd have to pay more for it at the Seventy Second Street dairy than in a Greek coffee shop down the street. Another reason is that, as the possibilities of eating expanded in New York, Eastern European dairy dishes, which is not as attractive to enough people, especially people who didn't grow up eating them, I remember taking an English friend of mine to the garden cafeteria and he thought the food was unpalatably bland. He literally had to put Pepper on it. He couldn't eat it. The modern version of the contemporary version of what you could call a Jewish dairy is the kosher pizzeria. Some of them back in the sixties had a limited Eastern European menu. But today I think they'll veer more toward fettuccini alfredo and these kinds of kosher dairies, or sushi. I mean, there's a world of non-meat food to eat.

And so for the people interested in Eastern European-centric dairy restaurants, I think we're left looking at this long history.